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“Yes, Virginia, even Santa could get a ticket”

If you think police ticketing Girls Scouts for selling cookies is outrageous, I’ve got a better one: If the Seattle City Council votes Monday to pass the anti-solicitation ordinance put forward by Councilman Tim Burgess, even your Salvation Army Santa could get a $50 ticket.

If the hapless Santa didn’t have the money and tried to fight the ticket, he would not be entitled to a free lawyer. And if the notice for his court date didn’t reach him in time up at the North Pole and he missed his hearing, the court could issue a warrant for his arrest and, once nabbed, order him to take drug or alcohol treatment — all without Santa ever being put on trial or found guilty of committing a single, actual crime.

Now that you’re seeing red, I’ll admit: Salvation Army Santas are not panhandlers and of course the police would not ticket them or the Girl Scouts. That’s exactly the point that opponents of the ordinance made Wednesday at a last-ditch press conference where Councilman Nick Licata and staff from the ACLU, NAACP and Real Change (where I work) pointed to a report from the Seattle Human Rights Commission that tears Burgess’s ordinance to shreds for its lack of due process and serious errors.

The only people who would get the $50 ticket and ultimately be removed from the streets of Seattle, the civil rights attorneys said, are the jobless, disabled, poor and homeless who have been reduced to begging — people who might as well live at the North Pole for all the political clout they have to fight what Burgess, the Downtown Seattle Association and the Convention and Visitors Bureau have been trying to do in the blitzkrieg that began Feb. 25.

Since then, Burgess, who chairs the council’s Public Safety Committee, has insisted the statute won’t touch lawful panhandlers or solicitors, only “aggressive” types who use foul language or follow people down the street.

The beauty of the legislation, however, is that it completely confuses the two: In its language and the survey data of Seattle residents that it cites, it tosses panhandlers and extortionists into a blender and turns the switch on high — a masterful stroke that has brought Seattle to the brink of curbing the rights not just of “bums,” but your right to ask for a donation or sign up members for your organization or gather signatures on a petition for a cause you believe in.

It’s not just me saying this. It’s what the ACLU and the NAACP said Wednesday, a week after a shameful committee vote in which not a single council member seconded two amendments put forward by Licata that would have delayed enacting the ordinance until the city found more money for police foot patrols and homeless outreach services — two things that Burgess has called for in a larger five-point plan to curb street disorder.

But, as Licata had to point out Wednesday, there is no funding or even a commitment in Burgess’s ordinance for any extra street outreach or any more beat officers besides the redeployed bicycle officers who started patrolling Belltown April 1.

By itself, the proposed ordinance is not only unnecessary and divisive, but ineffective, ACLU Legislative Director Shankar Narayan said, because “it takes away attention and resources from getting at the real issues, the real fixes that get at the root causes of homelessness.”

In San Francisco, which passed a similar law in 2004, the vast majority of tickets have been issued to people of color, Narayan said, with no perceptible impact on panhandling, and Seattle already has an aggressive panhandling statute that allows police to arrest violators.

The difference is that, under Burgess’s proposal, police could write a civil infraction without a complainant. “This is being portrayed as a kinder, gentler kind of enforcement, but it’s really not,” Narayan said. “In fact, what we will have now is speed, certainty and severity” under a law that is “simply unsupported by the evidence.”

That evidence — attachments to the legislation that are supposed to document the ordinance’s legal justification — includes two surveys (one of Seattleites in general and another of downtown residents in particular), along with e-mails and statements from tourists and citizens complaining largely about panhandling, not aggressive panhandling.

The surveys “don’t bear out that people think downtown is an unsafe place,” Narayan said. And, before Burgess started promoting the ordinance last fall, Licata noted, e-mails to the council on aggressive panhandling were “few and far between” — the exact words that I recorded David Dillman, chief operating officer of the Downtown Seattle Association, using Feb. 25 to describe downtown’s aggressive panhandlers.

Burgess is not swayed. The documentation is there, he said in a phone interview Thursday, and “I find it ironic (that) when we try to lessen the penalties and move (aggressive panhandling) out of the criminal realm, the circular argument is that you’ll charge some of them with criminal violations.”

“I just don’t buy their argument,” he said.

There are a growing number of people, however, who don’t buy Burgess’s.

In recent days, the Seattle Community Council Federation and Democrats in the city’s 34th, 36th, 37th, and 46th Legislative Districts have all passed resolutions opposing the legislation. Former Councilman Jim Street, King County Councilman Larry Gossett and state Senators Jeanne Kohl-Welles and Joe McDermott have also come out against the bill.

As a result, some council members also appear to be stepping back: Besides Licata, who opposed the measure in the Public Safety Committee’s vote on April 7, sources tell me that Tom Rasmussen and Bruce Harrell will vote against the measure on Monday. If they can pick up a fourth vote, giving them an override-proof bloc, Mayor Mike McGinn said Friday that he would veto the measure, in part, because of what he called its potential for abuse.

“The subjectivity in this particular ordinance will be remarkable,” Seattle NAACP President James Bible said Wednesday. “It will justify inequitable treatment. It will justify officers approaching people without any real actual reason.

“Due process is absolutely lost,” he said, and “yes, Santa Claus, could get a ticket.”

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate..